I blame Douglas Coupland. Before he coined the term Gen X and set it loose into the cultural lexicon, we didn't care about analyzing and compiling character profiles of generations.

I was reminded of how damn I annoying I find these caricatures while reading A. O. Scott's NYT piece on Gen X's mid-life crisis, or more actually A. O. Scott's piece about 40 year-old men feeling dissatisfied with their lives (gasp! really!) that he attempts to cast as a generational phenomenon by name-checking Ben Stiller's latest movie, John Cusack's Hot Tub Time Machine and a novel no one has read. I'd like to believe he was spoofing the ennui-associated traits that Gen X gets tagged with, but, unfortunately, I think Scott has actually swallowed the stereotypes attached to his peers (especially male peers) hook, line and sinker and has chosen to regurgitate them on the pages of the New York Times.